The Meditative Gardener

About Cheryl Wilfong

Cheryl Wilfong is the author of The Meditative Gardener: Cultivating Mindfulness of Body, Feelings, and Mind (www.meditativegardener.com), winner of seven book awards. She also writes the blog, The Meditative Gardener, winner of a Blogisattva Award.

Cheryl is a co-founder of Vermont Insight Meditation Center (www.vermontinsight.org) where she regularly teaches meditation when she isn’t rearranging one of her 28 flowerbeds or tending her out-of-control vegetable garden. Master Gardener and mistress of metaphor, she delivers the Dharma into daily life in the garden on her award-winning blog www.themeditativegardener.blogspot.com. She is particularly interested in the parallels between nature and human nature.

In 2008, Cheryl graduated from the Community Dharma Leader program sponsored by Spirit Rock Meditation Center. She has completed the Integrated Study and Practice Program at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. She is currently studying a non-dual curriculum with Matt Flickstein.

She has been meditating for 20 minutes every morning with her neighbors since 1996. She attends a one-month retreat every year as well as a few study and practice retreats.

Cheryl on the trapeze

She discovered gardening the same year she attended her first retreat at Insight Meditation Society in 1977. She has a Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology from Antioch University New England, with a concentration in Mindfulness. She completed an internship with John Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program. In 1999, she became a Vermont Master Gardener, and she is also a Master Composter.

Cheryl is also the author of Following the Nez Perce Trail: A Guide to the Nee-Me-Poo National Historic Trail with eye-witness accounts, 2nd edition (2006)